Social Sciences
oracknows | January 29, 2014As I've discussed from time to time, the three most reviled vaccines among the antivaccine movement are the HPV vaccine (Gardasil and Cervarix), the hepatitis B vaccine, and the influenza vaccine. The first two tend to be demonized because of moralistic associations with sexual activity, given that HPV is most commonly spread by sexual activity and hepatitis is similarly often spread through bodily fluids exchanged during sex. This leads to what I've referred to as "slut-shaming" the HPV vaccine, given that it is recommended to be given before girls become sexually active by inferring (and…
oracknows | January 24, 2014After a digression yesterday, it's time to get back to business. Don't get me wrong. Yesterday's post was business. It was definitely something important (to me) that needed to be said, in my not-so-humble pseudonymous opinion. It just wasn't the usual business I engage in on this blog.
I've often referred to what I (and others) refer to as the "arrogance of ignorance." This particular not-so-desirable trait consists basically of people without any special training in a field or who are otherwise unqualified in a field coming to believe that they understand the field better than experts who…
drorzel | January 20, 2014I've gotten out of the habit of blogging about the books I read for fun here, mostly because I've gotten out of the habit of reading for fun. Not for lack of desire, but because between my job and the kids and the massive amounts of research reading for the book-in-progress, I haven't had time.
Of course, I make the occasional exception, and when one of my very favorite SF authors comes out with a new one, that's a great reason to read a little fiction. Robert Charles Wilson isn't the most prolific author, but he's consistently excellent, and always thought-provoking, so I was very happy to…
oracknows | December 31, 2013As I write this, 2013 is drawing to a close, with only a little more than 12 hours to go before the crowds now gathering at Times Square and elsewhere ring in 2014. For some of you, 2014 has already arrived or will arrive many hours before it does for me. I'm not normally one to do much navel gazing, but 2013 has been a mixed year. As far as this blog goes, for instance, readership is up, with over 3.5 million page views for the year, although that's still a little below the blog's height before the whole "Pepsigate" thing. (It's really hard to believe that was almost three and a half years…
jrosenhouse | December 29, 2013Over at Talking Philosophy, Mike LaBossiere takes up that question. Unfortunately, I think his answer is mostly wrong.
Here's his introduction:
One common conservative talking point is that academics is dominated by professors who are, if not outright communists, at least devout liberals. While there are obviously very conservative universities and conservative professors, this talking point has considerable truth behind it: professors in the United States do tend to be liberal.
Another common conservative talking point is that the academy is hostile to conservative ideas, conservative…
esiegel | December 23, 2013"A sister is both your mirror - and your opposite." -Elizabeth Fishel
With 110 deep-sky wonders to choose from in the Messier catalogue, our long-running series on Messier Monday promises to keep us busy for some time to come! As we've finally passed the winter solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere, many new spectacular sights await skygazers in the early part of the night. As it's also the 1-year anniversary of when we adopted a little sister for our dog from the local humane society, I thought it would only be fitting to highlight the little sister to last week's Messier object.
Image…
catdynamics | December 18, 2013An interesting new twist for the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society will be the "Augmented Reality" poster - an instantiation of the very rapidly growing augmented reality features appearing everywhere through smartphone apps or google glass.
V838 Mon poster by Vogt et al
will have a layar augmentation:
[caption id="attachment_3642" align="aligncenter" width="200"] Vogt et al poster viewed through layar app on an iPhone
(click to embiggen)[/caption]
using layar creator, tags are added to the poster which pop up when viewed through the app providing links to sources, videos,…
jdupuis | December 18, 2013Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that I can find around the web in various media outlets.
From the beginning it’s been a pretty popular service so I’m happy to continue it. The previous posts for all the 2013 lists are here.
This time it's EFF's Reading List: Books of 2013.
The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed by Nate Anderson
On Internet Freedom by Marvin Ammori
Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society edited by Benedetta Brevini,…
oracknows | December 11, 2013The central mystery of Stanislaw Burzynski is how he keeps managing, no matter what is thrown at him by state and federal medical authorities, to keep on treating patients with deadly cancers. He's like the Energizer Bunny; he just keeps going and going and going and going. Or maybe he's like the game Whac-A-Mole™, where, as soon as one strategy seems on the verge of shutting him down he pops up elsewhere with another angle.
Burzynski, as regular readers know, is the Houston doctor (I refuse to call him a cancer doctor, because he has no formal training in oncology or even board certification…
oracknows | December 10, 2013Vaccines against the human papilloma virus (HPV), such as Gardasil and Cervarix, seem to have a strange power over people who are otherwise reasonable about science and vaccines. For some reason, HPV vaccines seem to have an uncanny ability to turn such people into raging antivaccinationists almost as loony as the merry band of antivaccine loons over at Age of Autism. At the very least, they seem to make seemingly reasonable people susceptible to blandishments and tropes for which they'd normally otherwise never fall. Truly, Gardasil and Cervarix seem to be vaccines that make reasonable…
esiegel | December 8, 2013“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?” -Carl Sagan
It's a challenging thing, to admit to ourselves how vast and mysterious this Universe is, and how small and ignorant we all truly are. It can feel daunting and isolating to think about it, and solace can be difficult to find, as Mazzy Star can maybe help you related to as you listen to their wonderful song…
esiegel | December 6, 2013"The results of my observation are best explained by the assumption that a radiation of very great penetrating power enters our atmosphere from above." -Victor Hess
You might think of the largest and most powerful particle accelerators in the world -- places like SLAC, Fermilab and the Large Hadron Collider -- as the source of the highest energies we'll ever see. But everything we've ever done hear on Earth has absolutely nothing on the natural Universe itself! For this week's Ask Ethan, let's take a look at the simple question of our reader David Hurn, who asks:
Ever since I was a young…
jrosenhouse | December 3, 2013In an opinion piece for the New York Daily News, published in July 2012, mathematician Edward Frenkel and school superintendent Robert Ross write:
This Fourth of July will forever be remembered in the history of science as the day when the discovery of the Higgs boson was announced. The last remaining elementary particle among those predicted by the Standard Model of three forces of nature finally revealed itself through painstakingly assembled data of billions of collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, the most sophisticated machine ever built by humans.
But one important aspect of this…
oracknows | December 3, 2013I don't normally ask you, my readers for much, if anything, other than to read and for the subset of you who like to be active in the comments to have at it and, if so inclined, to cover my back by swatting down the trolls, quacks, and antivaccinationists who occasionally show up to infest the comments, so that I don't have to. However, given the story of Stanislaw Burzysnki, which I've been covering with frequent blog posts for over two years now, how could I not listen to the appeal of my friend and co-conspirator (note to Burzysnki fans: that "co-conspirator" bit was sarcasm) to take…
tsmith | November 21, 2013Now that seemingly the flu outbreak storyline has been wrapped up on The Walking Dead (unsurprisingly, but disappointingly, with their ineffective treatments proving to be miracle cures), there's still one more zombie microbiology topic I'd like to cover: what's up with the bite, and is it the cause of death? I said previously:
"We know the pathogen can certainly be spread by bites and then cause zombification that way..."
but one commenter disagreed, noting:
"I don’t think we have evidence for that from the show. I think it clearer that zombie bites cause death, and there doesn’t seem to be…
carlyo | November 19, 2013By Stacy Jannis
Connecting bright young minds with the tools and techniques they need today is the first step towards developing our work force tomorrow. Businesses and government have issued a challenge to educators to help this next generation acquire the creative high-performance STEM skills they need to better transform the world. The evolution of learning technologies, combined with new frameworks for learning standards, will help equip and propel our students forward towards this goal.
So how could our "Science in Fiction" video contest help students practice and refine these much…
esiegel | November 16, 2013"I like to compare the holiday season with the way a child listens to a favorite story. The pleasure is in the familiar way the story begins, the anticipation of familiar turns it takes, the familiar moments of suspense, and the familiar climax and ending." -Fred Rogers
I know it's still the middle of November, but I know that many of you are already thinking about holiday gifts for the lovers of physics, astronomy and the Universe in your life. People send me books and other educational materials throughout the year for review, and although they all have good and bad points about them, I'm…
tsmith | November 5, 2013(As previously, spoilers abound)
So on this week's Walking Dead soap opera, we find that Daryl/Michonne's group is still out and about searching for medical supplies. Back at the prison, the food situation is dire (apparently all the food stores were in the cell block where the infection broke out), so Rick and Carol head out to look for both medicines and food from the local 'burbs. During their outing, discussion ensues of Carol's attempt to stop the prison's apparent influenza outbreak by killing two people who, at that point, were the only ones showing symptoms of disease. Rick decides he…
catdynamics | October 30, 2013Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious ship which will peer far and wide...
The European Space Agency is being very sensible and mapping out its schedule for large and medium science missions for the medium term, under the Cosmic Vision program.
In particular, the first of the large missions, L1, has been chosen and is JUICE, Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer - a Jovian orbiter scheduled for launch in 2022, to study the three outer Galilean Moons.
Athena
The other mission concepts which competed for the L1 mission slot were Athena, a reformulated large X-ray observatory - Athena is revisit of the…
oracknows | October 30, 2013If there's one medical treatment that proponents of "alternative medicine" love to hate, it's chemotherapy. Rants against "poisoning" are a regular staple on "alternative health" websites, usually coupled with insinuations or outright accusations that the only reason oncologists administer chemotherapy is because of the "cancer industrial complex" in which big pharma profits massively from selling chemotherapeutic agents and oncologists and hospitals profit massively from administering them. Indeed, I've lost track of the number of such rants I've deconstructed over the last nine years.…